If the USA produced the same percentage of its electricity with nuclear energy as does France, the environmental savings in green house gases would be greater than 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. This amount of carbon dioxide savings represents a further 15% reduction in green house gases than the Kyoto agreement savings. The time it takes Japan to go from regulatory approval to a functioning nuclear power plant is 5 years. Conservation, solar, wind power would provide 15% reduction in the present green house gases emisions, roughly equivalant to 250 million tons of carbon dioxide. The aforementioned are sound bitess from Newt Gingrich in a new book.
Yes but.... storage of plutonium, safety of nuclear power plants, use public transportation, ride a bicycle, etc, etc, etc. Yuca Mountain storage, 2 miles below the surface, in mobile, constantly exchanging casks is currently feasable. Demographics and an aging population are against bicycle riding. Look around you; how many 65 to 75 year olds are riding bicycles now. How many "aged" bike riding people would it take to reduce green house gases by 10 million tons; roughly 50 million of the 65 million new aged expected in 10 years. Public transportions in every part of the world is not self-supporting and is subsidized by tax dollars. How many "kneeling buses" would a municipality have to add to accomodate people with canes, walkers, wheelchair, and others who have difficulty climbing the stairs up into the bus. Who would help the people coming home from the grocery store with their load of groceries for one week. Or, would we, ie, society in general, expect that people would go to the grocery store every day as happens in the major part of the would: more municiple kneeling buses. In the present world, what happens when the sun does not shine: East Lansing would go without electricity for 7 months a year? Rochester New York, Seattle Washington, Peoria Illinois, Portland Oregon, etc are notorious for sustained cloudy days. What about wind energy? What happens when the wind does not blow. What is the track record of the wind farms along the California portion of Interstate 80: ideal sites for wind blowing, right? Wrong. Unintended consequences. How many migratory birds are chopped down by the whirling blades? How long are the winds sustained? Do the winds blow at night? Is there a transition in wind speeds between sunrise and again at sunset? You bet'cha there is. The wind stops! Maybe we should collect all the carbon dioxide from coal fired power plants and bury it in the ground. The technology is just around the corner, eh? Of course we are talking about influencing the 2% of green house gases attributable to human activity and not the 98% attributable to "natural" sources. Why have the oceans decreased by 5% their absorption of Carbon Dioxide? Does anyone know? Of course not. Why is the planet Mars Southern polar ice sheet melting at the SAME rate as our polar ice sheets melting on Earth? Has this anything to do with our Sun? Possibly, no one knows.
At what point, what will it take, which environmentalist will have to eat crow? Maybe it requires that the people who brought an end to nuclear power proliferation in the USA 30 years ago will have to retire (90% of whom will have osteoarthritis), endure their arthritic knees and hips, slow way down with their coronary artery disease, walk a lot less with their diabetes peripheral vascular disease and leg amputations. Who will shut off the hospital intensive care respirators, monitors, renal dialysis machines, when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow?
There are more than 5 billion people in the world now, soon there will be 6 billion. Does anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of agriculture beleive that these billions of people can be fed with the present level of technology, crop and soil science, genetically enginered crops, energy dependent fertilizers? You are whoefully uninformed if you believe that, at least for the next 100 years, adequate for human survival, electrical energy can be harvested from the sun, wind, and getting back to nature with a 'healthy' life style.
I believe the present environmental generation, self focused and consumed by their youth, who are not using canes and walkers yet, will live to see a scarcity of electricity impacting negatively on the lives of billions of people. The repercussions of low electricity availablity will result in a class war some place on earth over energy, just as it is in the Middle East now for oil, there will be fighting for electricity between the haves and have nots. Those people who can generate electricity with a small carbon footprint, as coal, gas, oil will be increasingly costly and unavailable for most of the world's population, those producing people, and I am not saying countries, will come under relentless attack by the have nots. The present class war is believed to be related to religion; yet, looking at who is doing the fighting, commiting suicide, etc, it is the have nots; against France, Germany, England, island Sweden, groups within India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, China, Indonesia, Australia, and of course, the greatest Satin USA. Religion is the seragot reason for the fight against the wealthy, and wealth in this century will revolve around the ability to produce energy.
The licensing, construction, and pricing of nuclear energy is likely to play the largest role in providing electricity to our world; at least until hydrogen based fuels become technologically feasable, most likely not until the 22nd century. The proliferation of nuclear energy is the most available option for this early part of our 21st century.
4 comments:
Dad,
I hate to put it so bluntly, but your entry here is full of hyperbole and factual errors.
Here are some facts about solar energy (which is, by the way, nuclear energy):
1M^2 of area in California receives about 1KW of electricity. At 10% efficiency that means a mere 100m x 100m array of solar collectors can generate 1MW of electricity, or, a 1km x 1km array can produce around 100MW, 8hrs per day That's a lot of power. So the issue is really just cost of collection, and energy storage.
Besides solar concentrators and photo-voltaic technologies (including very low cost thin film and polymer technologies that will be coming online in the next few years), the cost of which is decreasing rapidly, there is also a very efficient technology being rolled out as we speak that can convert enormous amounts of energy at very high efficiency: solar towers. After the success of a Spanish prototype, Australia is building a "baby" 50MW, 1600ft version. The taller the more efficient, so the next one will be 1/2 mile tall.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/01/technology/towerofpower0802.biz2/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
While this technology is immature, the concept is dead simple, and tested. It's really a question of efficient and effective construction techniques, which improve every year, and gathering momentum for large capital expenditures.
As an added benefit, solar towers can also be used to desalinate water, which brings me to what I believe is the biggest error in your writing: water, and not energy, is going to be the biggest source of conflict in the next century. With many the worlds aquifers at alarmingly low levels, and many more being poisoned by heavy industry, access to clean water is fast becoming the biggest problem for the worlds poor.
If desalination can be done cheaply (e.g. with cheap energy), then perhaps we can dodge that bullet at the same time.
Finally, your statements about "anyone who knows about modern agriculture," are, ironically, just flat wrong. Here are the facts:
- BP just invested 500M in a group of universities lead by Berkeley, under the auspices of the "Energy Biosciences Institute" to study, among other things, bio fuels.
- Some of the main focii of these studies will be:
- bacteria that can produce ethanol from cellulose, such as those found in the digestive systems of termites
- Algae based oil sources for producing bio-diesel (http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html), which could replace all transportation fuel used by the US with an estimated 15,000 square miles. This should be compared with the 450 million square miles used for agriculture in the US. Even if the estimate of 15,000 square miles is off by a factor of 10, this would mean replacing 0.033% of our agricultural land with energy production. Unless of course the algae were farmed in lands unusable for other purposes, which they can be.
- traditional oil / sugar producing crops that produce dramatically more oil / sugar than soy beans and corn. Soy and corn are used in the US for political reasons, and many of the criticisms of biofuels, particularly surrounding energy efficiency, are based on information about producing these particularly impoverished (from an energy standpoint) crops.
Newt, GWB and co. are woefully ignorant of modern technology, and generally seem to be missing very important facts. I believe that California will yet again lead the nation and the world economically, because our government and private sector has the foresight to fund research and incubate technologies that that address critical problems in society, and to convert those technologies into reality. Newt, GWB and Co. are chasing quick money, make no mistake. But quick money doesn't build an economy. Technology and policy does.
RJ: I am in agreement with everything that you say except the first paragraph. And yes, Newt and GWB are woeful.
There will be world wide regional fights over potable water in the future as there currently are in our Southwest. Canada vs USA have been fighting over Great Lakes water for the last 5 decades. With lower lake waters, the arguements will heat up I believe.
As you mentioned, storage of energy is a major component of solar energy technology, and, unfortunately, storage technology has not advance passed the lead acid battery, technology now over 100 years old. The weight of the battery (lead), inefficient accumulation of electricity, storage, and release gives a short cycle, shorting out in 5 years, producing explosive hydrogen gas are but some of its short comings. Other technologies may prove ultimately feasable (saline heat storage) but nothing that I have read about is likely going to be a major player over the next 25 years.
And this leaves us with what to do in the areas where the sun does not shine, nor the wind blow. The expected 5% increase in electricity demands for the next two decades makes the "magic of compounding", to use a financial term, so much more worrisome as that 5% already factors in increase energy efficency of homes and buildings, conservation, and recycling. Our homes and buildings are lasting very much longer than ever expected, and, as they were built with much older technology regarding energy utilization. Retrofitting is energy costly as opposed to building energy efficient from scratch. Here in the Rust Belt, and in the many other places in the world where the sun does not shine nor the wind blow, electricity will come from fossile fuel, or, with a change in societal climate here in the USA, nuclear energy.
Whether using oil pumped in the Middle East, or creating oil from crops, carbon dioxide will be produced in the oil's combustion contributing to green house gases.
Irrespective of the motivations of Newt Gingrich or GWB or whomever, financial or otherwise, I believe that nuclear energy, from boiling water reactors now to sustained nuclear fusion energy utilizing plutonium in the distant future, are on the continum for energy independance.
Well, first of all, solar energy generation peaks during peak load times, so that mitigates the storage problem to some extent.
Also, lead acid batteries are far from the state of the art in energy storage. As you mentioned, saline or other liquids like freon are good at storing heat energy, and ballasts are good at storing mechanical energy. I believe that these technologies could easily be practical long before we could build out enough solar capacity to replace a large percentage of our fossil fuel use.
Super-capacitors are becoming common (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor that now have a higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries, which, in turn have a far higher energy density than lead acid (leaving aside, of course, a LI battery's propensity to explode when they heat up). And super-capacitors can charge and discharge at a very high rate, making them appropriate for load smoothing, such as in cars.
As for how to provide solar power to those of us who live in the north, this is what a modern electricity grid does. In fact, the original (modern) solar tower proposal was done by a Israeli university, and proposed that African nations could build excess capacity and sell the electricity to Europe. This is a pretty detailed economic analysis which factors in transmission costs, etc. Can't find the link...
Also, regarding storage, there is an untested design which can exploit the temperature variations during day and night by storing energy in the ground during the day, and releasing it at night: http://www.shpegs.org/ I'm not sure where this will go, but it looks promising, albeit more complicated than a solar regular tower, like the one being built in Australia...
Although I am not as knowledgable about the subject as RJ, I just want to chime in on his side: our economy is driven by financial opportunities for the biggest/loudest voice, not necessarily the best or most efficient technology. Right now, solar energy cannot be dominated by key players the way nuclear power can be, so of course nuclear is the "green" technology of choice for the people who stand to benefit from it!
To get an idea of the MANY other ideas out there, just look at other countries who are trying to meet Kyoto Protocal standards... of course, Sweden is the one I'm most familier with. Many cities have already converted 20% of their total energy use over to "biogas," fueled by sawdust from lumberyards, slaughterhouse reminants, etc. Already.
Lastly, I want to remind you to read new info with an open mind. Otherwise, this is not a conversation, just a rant.
From your loving daughter!
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